Virginia Beach - From the Outer Banks to York County, people reported their homes shaking, things falling off the walls and even hearing odd sounds. We asked about it on the WVEC13 Facebook page and hundreds of people talked about what they experienced around 8:00 a.m.

Jennifer Goyet posted, "I was in my garage and I did not feel it BUT I heard it. Sounds like something bumped into my garage door from the wind but I looked and no wind."

"Hampton got three loud rumbles about a minute or two apart. Didn't feel like a quake but a trash truck or thunder," posted Ketie Martines.

Kimberly O'Connor Melnyk wrote, "I live 1/2 a mile from the court house in Virginia Beach. My house shook, and a few seconds later, it shook again."

Jim Ansell posted, "Shook the house in Knotts Island. 4 in a row. Lasted about 3-4 seconds each and were between 30 sec-1 min apart."

The U.S. Geological Survey told 13News Now there was a sonic boom reported in Norfolk at 8:00 a.m., but officials didn't have information on the source of the boom. A sonic boom is caused by planes flying faster than the speed of sound.13News Now checked with NAS Oceana and was told that no flight operations were going on that would have caused it.

Over at Tidewater Community College, Greg Frank, Dean of Natural Sciences at the Virginia Beach campus, said no instruments picked up anything indicative of an earthquake. That would indicate that the event was either a surface disturbance (ie. Explosion) or atmospheric (ie. Sonic boom). Even the NOAA site did not pick up anything, he said.

Reader Comments

West Virginia is landlocked, and has no peninsula. It does have a panhandle, but that's not what the article references. It does reference the peninsula on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake (Delmarva Peninsula), which is not all that far from North Carolina's Outer Banks. When I was a beach-goer as a kid, I remember hearing sonic booms from the military jets that sometimes fly around there. Langley Air Force Base and Norfolk Naval Air Station are both nearby. If there were no jets, then it's maybe suspicious. Nevertheless:

Scientists living under an oppressive regime
decide to clinically study the founders and supporters of evil regimes to determine what common factor is at play in the rise and propagation of man's inhumanity to man.